After the War is Over (17 page)

‘Tom can’t possibly stay in Wales with her, Dad,’ she explained. ‘He’s got his patients to look after. Iris needs peace and quiet, like; her blood pressure’s sky high. And it’s ever so noisy in their house; people turn up at all times of the day and night and the telephone never stops ringing. And what with the trams running right past . . .’ She shook her head, as if it was sheer bedlam in the doctor’s house, which indeed it was sometimes. ‘Iris’ll stay in the nursing home, and I’ll live just around the corner and go in and see her every day. Otherwise, she’ll feel dead lonely.’

‘Me, I feel dead flattered that the doctor wants our Nellie to look after his wife while she’s up the stick,’ Mabel said.

‘Are you getting paid?’ Alfred wanted to know. He still looked suspicious, but then his own actions were so crooked that he found it hard to comprehend that a person could help another without expecting a reward.

‘We haven’t discussed it, Dad.’ She had no intention of selling her baby for cash.

They moved to Caerdovey on the first Sunday in February, arriving by car at midday. It was a bitterly cold day, but the woman who lived in the house next door, Nerys Jones, who’d been engaged as a cook and cleaner, already had a stew prepared, and fires had been lit in both the downstairs rooms.

Iris rubbed her hands together. ‘It’s nice and warm in here,’ she said gratefully. She seemed to feel the cold more intensely than most people.

Nell wandered about the house admiring the wallpaper – plain and pale, as Iris had requested. The creams and light greys made the rooms appear bigger, and the flowered curtains looked dead pretty. The linoleum was an unobtrusive mottled pattern. The Irish Sea could be seen from the upstairs windows, a not particularly attractive sight today – the water was leaden and the sky a depressing mixture of black and grey clouds.

Tom shouted that he’d like to have lunch immediately, so he could get back to Liverpool before it got dark.

‘Don’t forget,’ Tom said after they had eaten and he was ready to leave, ‘if this place isn’t satisfactory, we’ll find somewhere better. In case of emergency, you can ring me from the telephone in the post office.’ He kissed his wife on the lips and Nell on her cheek. ‘I’ll be back again next Sunday,’ he promised and was gone.

Nell surveyed the range of items spread out on the table, brought to keep them occupied during the forthcoming months: baby knitting wool, needles and crochet hooks, tiny gowns to be embroidered along with the coloured thread to do it, books, writing pads, drawing pads, crayons . . . There was also a wireless with an acid battery.

‘I suggest we go for a walk on the sands every morning, as long as the weather is nice, that is.’ Iris began to put the books in a row on the new sideboard. ‘I must say,’ she added, smoothing her hand along the sideboard top, ‘I really like this utility furniture. I much prefer it without beading and curly bits and fancy knobs. It looks really expensive.’

‘Hmm,’ Nell murmured. ‘Shall I make some tea?’

‘Yes, but this tea is all you’ll be allowed to make,’ Iris said sternly. ‘Nerys is going to cook all our meals except for breakfast. I must give her our ration books later, so she can register us with the local grocer.’

‘I would have been happy to do the cooking.’ Nell was worried she would become bored with nothing to do. She wasn’t much good at needlework. She liked reading at bedtime, but it seemed self-indulgent to do it during the day.

‘Tom has ordered you to do nothing but rest. Are you wearing your wedding ring, Nell?’

Nell displayed the ring on her left hand that she’d bought for sixpence from Woolworth’s in Bootle. ‘It’s brass. I bet it turns me finger green.’

‘Perhaps you should take it off at night.’

‘I’ll try and remember.’ Nell twisted the ring around. She’d been introduced to Nerys as Mrs Nell Desmond. She said the words out loud. ‘Mrs Nell Desmond.’

Iris looked up and smiled. ‘I can’t thank you enough for what you’re doing for me and Tom, Mrs Nell Desmond.’

‘Think nothing of it,’ Nell said lightly. She didn’t know what else to say, or how to explain that she felt just as grateful to Iris and Tom for taking her baby as they were to her for giving it to them. She’d known girls in the army who’d got into her position and had abortions, but as far as Nell was concerned, an abortion was out-and-out murder. She could never have lived with herself had she had her baby murdered. Giving it away to strangers was almost as bad, knowing that somewhere in the world she had a son or a daughter she’d never see again and who wouldn’t know who its real mother was. Letting it go to people she loved was the perfect solution. She went into the kitchen. ‘I’ll make that tea.’

Iris had insisted that Nell sleep in the front bedroom. ‘It has the best view. In fact you’re to have the best of everything.’

When Nell pulled back the curtain next morning, the Irish Sea looked just as miserable as the day before and the sky just as leaden. She was about to turn away when she glanced downwards and shouted, ‘Iris!’

‘I know,’ Iris yelled back. ‘I’ve just opened the curtains and seen the hills behind – they’re covered in snow!’

‘It’s deep,
really
deep.’ Nell put on her new extra-warm dressing gown and slippers and went downstairs. She pulled back the curtains and gasped. A snowdrift covered half the window.

Iris came in. ‘It’s been this deep down south for days,’ she said.

‘And now it’s this deep in Wales.’ Nell shuddered. ‘I don’t like it – it makes me feel trapped.’ It was like being in a giant white coffin.

‘When Nerys comes, I’ll ask if she knows someone who will clear it away.’

Although Nerys only lived next door, she’d still have to battle through the thick snow to reach them. ‘Can we turn the wireless on?’ Nell asked.

‘You can do anything you want,’ Iris insisted.

Nell switched on the wireless. A cultured male voice on the BBC was reading the eight o’clock news. Heavy snow had reached the Midlands, he announced, and was due to spread further north that very night.

‘I suppose it’s about time the north had its share.’ Iris knelt down and began to brush the ashes out of the grate. ‘This still feels warm.’

Nell had only just discovered that she hated snow, this sort of snow, the sort that stopped you from leaving the house. The voice on the wireless was at least confirmation that she and Iris weren’t the only two people on earth left alive. Coming from a city, she wasn’t used to being isolated. She pulled the dressing gown around her as if it offered protection, not just warmth, whilst saying a little silent prayer that the snow would soon go away and never come back. ‘We didn’t bring wellies,’ she said.

‘What?’ Iris sneezed. The ash must have got up her nose.

‘Wellies – wellingtons, we didn’t bring any. We won’t be able to go out in the snow.’

‘We couldn’t anyway, Nell. The boots would be full of snow before we’d gone a few feet.’

The back door opened and Nerys burst in covered with clumps of white and carrying a brown muggin teapot. She was a well-built woman of about sixty, with red cheeks and a determined face, who would prove to be worth her weight in gold in the near future.

‘I could hear you from next door cleaning the fireplace,’ she said breathlessly. ‘But that’s my job, luvvies. You both sit down now in the other room and have a cup of tea while I light the fire.’

Nell hadn’t thought she was frightened of anything apart from obvious things like axe murderers and escaped lunatics. The loudest thunder didn’t bother her, nor the sharpest cracks of lightning. She wasn’t a hypochondriac, never became hysterical, wasn’t afraid of the dark, but being shut in a house surrounded by snow, unable to get out, she had discovered was quite terrifying.

‘This is cosy,’ Iris would say when darkness fell and they sat down to read or sew or knit.

Within a few days, it became obvious that the entire country was covered by a thick blanket of white and there was no sign that the snow would soon stop falling. Blizzards came, lasting forty-eight hours. Winds lashed the unprotected houses, screaming down the chimneys and round the edges of windows and doors.

Nothing was being delivered. There were no letters, newspapers or fuel. Nerys’s son, Idris, fetched groceries from the village using a hastily made sledge, including condensed milk when the real sort was no longer available. The only meat and fresh fruit was that produced locally. Nerys made delicious soup from chicken bones, and baked bread every two days, but she would soon be out of flour. Although more logs appeared in the tiny yard, she suggested she only light one of the fires in case the supply dried up. The little village school closed down, and so did the hotel.

There was no sign of Tom, who’d promised to drive down to Caerdovey every Sunday: roads all over the country were blocked. Iris saw no point in writing him a letter, nor expecting him to write to them. The snow was much too thick to walk to the post office and use the telephone. One of the reasons for him to visit regularly was to keep an eye on Nell and her baby, but Iris was of the opinion that both were coming along famously.

Some of the snow outside the row of houses had been cleared for children to play on. Their cheerful cries were the only thing that Nell found heartening during all of that unhappy time.

The baby in her stomach began to grow at a rapid rate. Within no time at all she was huge. She went up and down the stairs dozens of times a day in order to get some exercise. She felt sick; her clothes felt too tight, even though they were loose.

Iris fussed around, fetching things, insisting that she rest, not allowing her to do so much as poke the fire, until Nell wanted to scream at her to stop, leave her alone. Let me
do
something, she wanted to cry. Yet previously she had always had the patience of Job. She’d been well known for it in the army. No matter how bad-tempered or unreasonable the corporals and sergeants in charge of the canteen were, Nell carried on working, singing serenely to herself. But now Iris’s kindness, and Nerys’s too, was getting her down, though Nell gave no sign of it. She never once let on how miserable she was.

‘Nell,’ Iris said one night in the middle of one of the worst storms, the house creaking and groaning as if the bricks might fall apart and land on top of them. ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking, but the night you were raped, why didn’t you cry out or something? I mean, it must have hurt, being the first time. But there was no blood anywhere.’

Nell smiled, not at Iris, but at something in the past. ‘It wasn’t the first time,’ she said softly. ‘My corporal, the one who was killed, made love to me. It was the least I could do when he’d asked to marry me. And he made sure I wouldn’t have his baby. Oh, and Iris, I wasn’t raped at the party. I did tell you that.’

Mornings, first thing, Nell would draw back the curtains in the bedroom to find that her prayers remained unanswered: there was yet more snow and the world was silent. She would wonder if she had gone deaf. Sometimes the snow would be falling, great lumps of it building up on the windowsill. She would bang the window and it would fall off, though not if it had already frozen. Like most people, she had forgotten what the sun looked like.

March arrived and nothing changed, until one day Nell pulled back the curtains to discover there’d been no fresh snow overnight. A few days later, it began to thaw and there were floods as the ice melted. Milk was restored, eggs, fruit. It was still cold outside, though, and the ground too dangerously icy to walk on.

Iris took the risk of slipping over and went to the post office to telephone Tom.

‘He’s coming on Sunday,’ she said gleefully when she came back. ‘He set off to come and see us quite a few times, but had to turn back when he found the roads were blocked.’

Tom brought a fresh battery for the wireless, scented soap from Adele, magazines, and cream cakes from Sayers’ confectioners.

‘And how are you, Nell?’ he asked. ‘You only have another nine weeks to go.’

Iris grinned. ‘She’s fine, aren’t you, love? I’ve been keeping a close eye on her,’ she said to Tom.

‘I’m fine, like Iris says,’ Nell confirmed.

Tom listened to her heartbeat, felt her pulse, looked down her throat, pressed her tummy a few times, and pronounced her perfectly fit.

April came. It was the first Good Friday, Nell announced, that she hadn’t done the Stations of the Cross – there wasn’t a Catholic church in Caerdovey. ‘Me and Maggie used to do them together. I wonder if she’s doing them in London?’

During the worst of the weather, she’d gathered from the wireless that the snow was just as heavy in London, but that workmen came out at dawn to shovel it away. Some buses and trains ran, if not all. Most cinemas, theatres and restaurants had remained open. People still went to work. Nell had written imaginary letters to her friend telling her how desperately awful it was in Caerdovey. Since then, she’d sent a real letter, less truthful than the imaginary ones, saying that everything was okay, she was enjoying her stay in the countryside, and Iris’s pregnancy was proceeding well. She owed it to Iris and Tom never to tell Maggie the real truth anyroad.

It wasn’t until April was nearly over that the earth was completely dry, the sun shone warmly, and there was a tingle of spring in the air. Snowdrops had managed to struggle through the hard ground and were scattered over the hills behind the cottages, followed later by yellow crocuses. There was a pretty bluebell wood nearby that they could walk to, Nerys informed them.

It was while wandering through this little blue heaven that Nell realised that she was her old self again. Both women walked carefully so as not to tread on the flowers. Birds chirruped, squirrels chased each other through the spreading branches of the trees, rabbits leapt across their path, the undergrowth rustled with creatures unseen. There was a wonderful, fresh smell.

‘It’s magic,’ Nell whispered. For the first time in weeks, she felt glad to be alive. She looked forward to having the baby, giving it to Iris and Tom, and starting to lead her old life once again.

It had been Tom’s intention to stay at the cottage for several days before the baby was due, having arranged with his father to look after the practice at home. He would deliver the child, stay another few days, then return to Liverpool with both women and the baby.